While I applaud Paul Craney for highlighting a very important issue in his column this week (“Minimum wage hike: Old, honorable and fundamentally flawed”), I disagree — respectfully but deeply — with his characterization of the proposed reforms.

While I applaud Paul Craney for highlighting a very important issue in his column this week (“Minimum wage hike: Old, honorable and fundamentally flawed”), I disagree — respectfully but deeply — with his characterization of the proposed reforms.

I’m co-sponsoring legislation in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over the next three years. It’s a modest increase. Had our minimum wage kept pace with the cost of living over the past four decades, it would be over $10.50/hour today. Had it kept pace with increases in productivity, it would be about $22 an hour. Had it kept pace with wage growth for the top one percent of income earners, it would be closer to $33 an hour.

But it hasn’t. Today, at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a full-time worker makes around $15,000 a year — $3,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. Even in Massachusetts, where the minimum wage is set at $8 an hour, it is estimated that a full-time worker would have to work 120 hours a week in order to realistically afford a two-bedroom apartment for his or her family at fair market rent.

And even if Mr. Craney is correct that minimum wage workers are seldom sole breadwinners (though low-wage workers are twice as likely to be single parents than workers in general), that means it would still take two minimum wage-earning adults at least 60 hours a week each to make rent on that apartment – not including what they would have to pay for child care with both parents working 12 hours a day.

That is not a livable wage. It’s not a decent wage or a fair wage. We’re the most dynamic economy in the world, and we can do better.

Mr. Craney cites a New York Times article from the mid-’80s that says hiking the minimum wage is a flawed way to overcome poverty. With due respect to both Mr. Craney and The New York Times, I don’t think anyone advocating for a higher wage believes it is the silver bullet to end poverty.

But with these reforms, more than 30 million workers would receive a raise. Nearly 90 percent are adults over the age of 20. Sixty percent are women and nearly half are workers of color. Two-thirds of them work for big businesses, not small. These aren’t just teenagers with summer jobs at the local ice cream shop, as Mr. Craney would have you believe. They are childcare providers, housekeepers and cashiers; mothers and fathers trying to keep food on the table like anyone else.

Study after study has shown that raising the minimum wage has no negative effect on employment and growth.

It’s actually been shown to be a net positive. One study found that every $1 increase in the minimum wage boosts consumer spending in a low-wage worker’s household by $2,800 the following year. That’s money directed largely back into the local economy.

Mr. Craney’s central argument seems to be that Massachusetts must remain a competitive place to do business. I agree wholeheartedly. But I believe that means investing in the infrastructure and education that have been drawing world-class businesses to Massachusetts for decades.

It means supporting the small businesses that carry our economy by streamlining burdensome regulations, reducing energy costs, and keeping taxes as low as possible. It does not mean placing the responsibility of maintaining our competitive edge at the feet of low-wage workers.

Forcing people to live in poverty in order to promote an attractive business environment is as economically shortsighted as it is morally misguided.